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I've a woody with some packages backported from sarge
(debhelper 4.1.90 and dpkg-dev 1.10).

Running python2.3 ./setup.py bdist_deb with some of
my projects, I got the error:

dpkg-buildpackage: unknown option or argument
--check-dirname-level=1
Debian dpkg-buildpackage .

Commenting out the "check-dirname-level" and
"check-dirname-regex" options in the bdist_deb.py file
the script can go on, but it exits with the error:

debian/rules:11: *** first argument to `word' function must
be greater than 0.  Stop.

Hope this helps.